Relax – your phone probably isn’t going to give you cancer

The US National Toxicology Program last week released some results from a two-year study in which more than 1000 rats were exposed to differing levels of cellphone radiation for 9 hours a day, for the whole of their lives.

No increases in brain or heart tumours were observed in female rats. But around 3 per cent of males developed a brain cancer known as malignant glioma, and up to 6 per cent grew heart tumours called schwannomas (BioRxiv, doi.org/bjfm).

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Michael Lauer of the US National Institutes of Health says the results should be interpreted with caution. The number of cancers was small, meaning they could be statistical blips, he says.

Most of the rats in the study were exposed to radiation levels higher than those permitted in current phone models, and on average, the exposed rats lived longer than the controls.